René Magritte

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TY364 / PB112 / RD215 / Sun conjunction


René François Ghislain Magritte (November 21, 1898 – August 15, 1967) was a Belgian surrealist artist. One of the most prominent Surrealist painters whose bizarre flights of fancy blended horror, peril, comedy, and mystery. His works were characterized by particular symbols—the female torso, the bourgeois “little man,” the bowler hat, the castle, the rock, the window, and others.

René François-Ghislain Magritte was born on November 21st, 1898, in Lessines, Belgium, the eldest of three boys. Even at an early age, he liked to draw, and was encouraged to do so by his father Léopold. He later started painting at the age of 12. Régine Bertinchamp, Magritte's mother, suffered from depression; one night, while the rest of the family was asleep she fled to go to throw herself over a bridge, into the river Sambre. A few days later, her body is found floating, her face covered by her nightgown; René, who was then only 14, was deeply scarred by the image, which was later going to reappear in some of his works (The Heart of the Matter (1928)).

At the age of 16, Magritte met Georgette Berger, the girl who would be his future wife and creative muse. A year later, in 1914, he left Georgette behind, and he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels to learn how to paint with all the "proper" techniques usually attributed to artists who worked in the figurative style, his plan was to master these techniques before breaking free of them. He would not see his beloved Georgette again until 1920, when by chance he would meet her at an art supply store.
While studying at the Academy of Fine Arts, Magritte met many artists who would influence his style, amongst them were E.L.T Mesens, Pierre Flouquet, and Piérre Bourgeois.

E.L.T. Mesens


1916-20

Magritte's best friend is the young poet Pierre Bourgeois, of whom he makes several portraits. They become interested in modernity and the Italian Futurists and invite Theo van Doesburg to give a lecture on the Dutch movement The Style.

Theo van Doesburg

"Theo van Doesburg tried from 1915 to 1917 to bring in new members for an alliance of Dutch artists. The purpose of the alliance was to stand up as a group instead of standing up as individual artists. In 1917 the first number of the magazine 'The Style' was launched. The idea for this magazine came from Theo van Doesburg. It was meant for explaining his own work as well as the work of the other members of the alliance. For them the magazine was an instrument to discuss new modern art and to spread their own ideas.
Still there are several points of view about the origin of The Style.

If we look at the date of foundation, the first World War, we can point out the endeavor of the society as base of the origin. At that time it was very chaotic in Holland. The people wanted peace, rest and harmony again. The members of The Style tried to reflect in their work what in the entire social development could not be achieved, The Ideal Harmony.

If we look at the former art periods, The Style seems a logic outcome of the Cubist period (1907- 1914). The Cubist artists tried to order the reality. The result of ordering the reality often looks like a harmonious totality. The cubists however, still used identifiable figures and elements in their paintings; their paintings were still telling something. The Style carried the principal of ordering the reality through, by ordering the reality even further. The paintings made by members of The Style do not show identifiable figures at all. These paintings have a non-telling character, but are still understandable and reflecting something.
The Style did not restrict itself to the art of painting. The members wanted to realize the principals of The Style in many different artistic areas, such as architecture, sculpture, design, etc.
Theo van Doesburg actually wanted to call the magazine 'The Straight Line', but influenced by the other members the name became 'The Style' after all. The members thought that the word 'Style', preceded by the the word 'The' , suggests that it is the best, possibly even the only style, usable in the modern art and society".

Magritte also showed some interest in the Futurist movement, and Cubism,
as it is seen in Nude (1919), but it was when he discovered Giorgio De Chirico's surrealist works that he found true inspiration. It was from this inspiration that Magritte decided to make each of his painting a visual poem; a quality he found present in De Chirico's works.
He is deeply affected by Song of Love (1914) by Giorgio de Chirico.


          
Giorgio De Chirico                               


1920

Magritte's exhibits his first Futurist-inspired paintings along with works by the painter Pierre Flouquet.

Pure geometric abstraction seems too radical to Magritte who begins to search for a different pictorial language, finding it in Cubism and Futurism.

Again meets Georgette Berger.

Georgette Berger

In June 28, 1922, René Magritte married Georgette Berger, wallpaper artist. Georgette becomes his model and chief inspiration.

Georgette and René


Works as graphic artist. He mainly draws motifs for wall-paper.

At that time, he develops a profound dislike for the decorative arts. He later would state: "I detest my past, and anyone else's. I detest resignation, patience, professional heroism and obligatory beautiful feelings. I also detest the decorative arts, folklore, advertising, voices making announcements, aerodynamism, boy scouts, the smell of moth balls, events of the moment, and drunken people."

 He also becomes friendly with Victor Servranckx, who had developed a very personal geometric-abstract style. This style becomes the beginning of a new direction for Magritte.


1922-23

Creates his first really outstanding works which are characterized by Cubo Futurist reminiscences, as in The Station (1922)
and the presence of a very sensual representation in which women and colors are the dominant elements, as in Donna (1923)

The graphic structure of this composition (simple shapes outlined in clear manner and the almost entire renunciation to the representation of the space depth) remembers the decorations and the posters of the art Déco.  

He realises that resorting to abstraction has not enabled him to 'make reality manifest.' What he wants to establish is a disturbing relationship between the world and objects.


1925

Magritte decides "only to paint objects with all their visible details". By placing them in situations which are unfamiliar to the spectator, he "challenges the real world". Magritte abandons the plastic qualities of pictorial art in favor of a more remote, colder style that portrays images from which all aestheticism had to be banished. Nocturne is one of the first works to reveal this change of emphasis. The work contains elements from the iconography that Magritte recognises for the first time and which he will use throughout his life: the painting within a painting, the bird in flight, and fire, adding to the stage curtain and to the wooden bilboquet.

Completes Woman Bathing, The Window  


1926


Completes Left Behind by the Shadow, The Difficult Crossing, The Forest.


Completes The Lost Jockey (1926) which, according to Magritte years later, was a critical milestone in his entry into Surrealism. The piece has a mysterious feeling, an anxiety without reason. This feeling of anxiety, which manifests itself in dark tonalities and mysterious juxtaposition of objects, first appears in his work in the mid-1920s.


1925-1930

Magritte begins combining words and images in his paintings. These word-pictures are not mere illustrations of an object or a concept.
On the contrary, his work is intended to gently destabilize our mental habits of representation.
Magritte elaborates on a didactic classification of this type of painting, the simplest which consists of denying an images through words, or vice versa.

1927

Magritte and Georgette move to Paris to be closer to where it all happens. He starts to take part in the activities of the Surrealists and becomes friends with Andre Breton, the self-appointed leader of the Surrealist movement, and Paul Eluard, Salvador Dali, and other artists and writers who were part of the surrealist movement in Paris.

     
Andre Breton             Paul Eluard                 Salvador Dali

Magritte held his first one-man exhibit was in Brussels in 1927, and as it was with his contemporaries, his art drew the ire of the critics and the conservative art crowd. But what made Magritte's work so special was his incredible skill at painting realistic objects and figures. The critics could not deny his talent, nor could they dismiss his work as an exercise in "laisser-faire". Like De Chirico, and Dali, he was a true technician, and a technician with soul. What set him apart from the other surrealists was his technique of juxtaposing ordinary objects in an extraordinary way; while Dali would "melt" a watch, playing with the consistency of an object (amongst other things), Magritte would leave objects intact, but play with their placement in reality, playing with logic. This technique is sometimes called Magic Realism. Of course, what really upset the critics was that Magritte's art did not provide answers, but only confusion, and questions as to why...

Photomontage were great enthusiasms of the surrealists in mid 1920s Paris. The Révolution Surréaliste included quite a number, including two by Rene Magritte. These made use of photomontage mainly to juxtapose incongruous objects (such as putting cows at stream edge before the Paris Opera--this by Magritte!). See Dawn Ades, Photomontage, p. 136. In some of his "experiments" with representation in the later 1920s, however, he discovered gradient blending of objects which normally appear with edges. This allowed him to avoid the edge or seam with composite objects. In these experiments he merged wood planking into sky (i.e. one background into another)("The Passion for Ideas," (1927) and The Cultivation of Ideas (1927)).  

>>>>>>>>>>
The Surrealist movement declared the irrational and contradictory a virtue. It was an attempt to explore the subconscious and to cause one to gain insight into the human mind. Magritte remained one of the major representatives of surrealist art until his death on August 15, 1967.
There were two main forms of surrealist art. The first was called organic or biomorphic and involved "automatic" drawing and calligraphy as a way of expressing the subconscious freely. Magritte was a member of the second branch which created more concrete and dream-like images. This second group created works which could be paradoxically considered to be realistic representations of the absurd or impossible. René Magritte was a master of this second form. The members of this second group were heavily influenced by De Chirico.
De Chirico was a painter and his works were a major influence on Magritte. Despite the fact that De Chirico's works were such an enormous factor in the development of Surrealism, and of Magritte's work in particular, the admiration and regard the Surrealists showed for De Chirico's pictures was not returned. De Chirico considered the surrealist movement a joke in light of the fact that his works were considered so important to the formation of this movement.
Another major influence on Magritte's work was a cinematic one. A five-part serial, "Fantomas", by the French movie-maker Louis Feuillade was the main cinematic influence on Magritte . This series of films (taken from novels of the same name) dealt with a character named Fantomas who captured the imagination of Magritte as well as many other surrealists. Fantomas was a "genius of evil ". He could commit grisly and brilliant crimes without leaving a trace . It is clear that Magritte was fascinated by the character of Fantomas. One of the rare occasions in which he made direct use of a source was in The Backfire or The Return of the Flame (1943)




and this was almost a direct copy from one of the covers of the Fantomas. In fact, the only change that he made was to replace the dagger in Fantomas' hand with a rose.


In another painting , The Threatened Assassin (1926), Magritte painted another episode from Fantomas . In this painting there are five men waiting outside of a room which contains the nude corpse of a woman and an unperturbed man standing by a gramophone. Fantomas strikes again.

At:

http://www.csulb.edu/~karenk/

>>Subject: it's a sex murder story, and is typical in the work of Magritte, the picture is a puzzle that cannot be solved. In the center of an inner room, we see a woman's nude body lying on the divan. A towel is placed over her neck, but that does not prevent us from determining that she has been decapitated. All is still now; the only trace of the bloody deed is evident in the blood that trickles down from her mouth. But who killed her? Could it be the man holding a club outside the open doorway, or the man on the other side holding a net, as if waiting to trap someone? Could it be the man inside the room, who has turned his back on the nude woman to stare intently into the phonograph? His overcoat is thrown over a neaby chair and a suitcase is all packed, ready to go. Out the window, three men poke their heads up to look inside. What did these three voyeurs witness? The scene presents us with a narrative puzzle that cannot be solved; instead, we only come up with more questions. Magritte's pictures are always violent in some way; though he never really shows an act of violence, he does violence to our accepted ideas and conventions in the way he undermines the reality we take for granted. Behind those proper bourgeois suits and bowler hats, a crime of desire is lurking. Magritte hints at a latent vs. manifest content. He is the secret agent man, the sabateur who sabotages our sense of security about the reality of appearances. <<


The influence of the cinema was further evident in Magritte's work in his use of multiple images.
For example, a Magritte painting called Man Reading a Newspaper (1928)
distinctly suggests the frames of a movie film. All of this demonstrates that the cinema had a remarkably strong influence on the works of René Magritte.

>>Magritte’s disconcertingly dead-pan style is seen clearly in these four simply-painted scenes, which seem to be indistinguishable apart from the disappearance of the man of the title. They suggest a subverted comic-strip and, indeed, were based on an illustration in a popular health manual. There are slight changes of perspective between the four panels, which add to the disquieting effect, and may relate to the displacement of images in early 3-D viewing devices. This subtle undermining of the everyday was characteristic of Magritte and his Belgian Surrealist colleagues, who preferred quiet subversion to overt public action.<<

Magritte brought to surrealism a style which was uniquely his own. Magritte painted objects with an almost photographic accuracy but placed them in unreal relation to one another. By using only familiar objects but bringing them together in such unreal ways, Magritte was able to create something unfamiliar and startling. Magritte wanted to make the viewer question the nature of accepted reality. By creating works that demonstrate that some part of the world can be irrational yet coherent, Magritte throws all "reality" into question. The human mind itself is what creates the magic of Magritte's work because that is where the twisting of consciousness and accepted reality actually takes place. This effect is immeasurably enhanced by Magritte's scrupulous depiction of appearances. By giving his impossible creations an almost photographic reality, the human mind is startled into the contemplation of what is real. The brain is challenged to actually consider that which is so basic to its concept of the world as to never before have required any real thought.
René Magritte's style of painting resulted in his being called a "Father of American Pop Art" in 1961. He, however, was not pleased by this association. He felt Pop Art was a joke and used the term sugar-coated Dadaism to describe it. His resentment of being associated with a movement which credited him for his immense influence upon it is certainly ironic in light of the fact that his feelings for American Pop Art exactly mirror those De Chirico had for Surrealism and Magritte.
René Magritte was an artist who took mundane objects, pulled them through his imagination and forced them out the other side in such unreal combinations and relationships that they could cause the viewer to question the very nature of reality. His works were efforts to overthrow the sense of the familiar. He was one of the greats of the Surrealist movement and it seems likely that his works will only gain in popularity over time. He was a maker of visual puzzles which never fail to provoke thought in the viewer".

Sources Used In Compiling This Essay :

Gablik, Suzi. "Magritte " Thames and Hudson, London. 1970.

Hughes, Robert. "The Shock of the New " Alfred A. Knopf, New York. 1981

Muller, Joseph-Émile."Modern Painting III Expressionists to Surrealists " Tudor Publishing Co., New York. 1965.

Waldberg, Patrick. "Surrealism " McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York.

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http://www.dragonrest.net/histories/magritte.html

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1928



Magritte is preparing Attempting the Impossible (1928)


By referring to the myth of Pygmalion, the painter represents a painter trying to paint in the air, as though it were a sculpture, a woman’s naked body. Only an arm is missing, that is true – but this arm will be missing forever.

Once again, he merged one background into another,  into a woman's naked body: The Discovery (1928).  

"Magritte makes us believe that seeing is touching at distance. He painted a visual metaphor about the tactility and softness of a woman's skin. The woman's body has been transformed, here and there, gradually into the graininess of a wooden structure. The canvas becomes a living surface, the image presents a metamorphose —a morphing of meaning. The merging forces the eye to think in a completely different way. Magritte creates multiple ways of seeing things simultaneously. Magritte shows us the impossible in the possible. The paintings of Magritte emerge from the mysteries of reality and the visible world around us".
http://www.doctorhugo.org/synaesthesia/art/index.html


This merging , he declared excitedly in a letter to Paul Nuogé, forces the eye
to think in a completely different way. It did not become a favorite technique of his, however, and the reason can perhaps be grasped from "The Discovery," which perhaps is not one of his most successful paintings.


The Titanic Days (1928)

One of the images more worrying and violent of all the Magritte's work.  In the bulky shape of a woman that is struggling, the artist draws two figures: a man that is attempting to rape a woman, where he advances and she rejects him. The two bodies united in a same figure and the contrast between the clear skin of the woman and the dark color of the head, of the shoulder and of the arm of the man give to the painting a harsh animation. Magritte  wrote:" I treated this subject, this fear that grasps the woman, using a subterfuge, the contrary of the lows of the space. ...the discovery is in the fact that the man is superimposed to the outline of the woman".  The dark siluette of the aggressor follows the shape of the body of the victim.  This gives the sense of the total control, like if he was already become part of her, like a success in his attempting  the impossible.  


1929

Travels to Cadaques to stay with the Surrealist painters Salvador Dali, Joan Miró and the Surrealist poet, Paul Eluard for a holiday.

Joan Miró

Completes The Treachery of Images (1929), the famous 'pipe' picture:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

"But this is not a pipe since we can not smoke it. It is only a representation of one. Magritte also first uses another technique around this time: that of representing a familiar object and given it a name other than its conventional one. Through this gallery of word-paintings, Magritte plays on the discrepancies, paradox, clarity and obscurity of common sense. The question remains as to whether the words actually represent what we think. As a result, the painting becomes a type of language.
Dali is perhaps the only other surrealist who's work could be compared to Magritte's. Both shared impeccable technique, and a great sense of humor. Another thing which may have angered critics was Magritte's "parodies" of famous paintings; like other surrealists, his irreverence and contempt for the norm was quite apparent in his work. It is evident that the humor magazines such as Harvey Kurtzman's Mad, and comedy troupes such as Monty Python owe much to the surrealists".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page


1930

The Annunciation (1930)

"The objects in this painting appear to be a metal sheet with bells, a paper cut-out and two balusters (Magritte referred to similar objects in his paintings as bilboquets, a French stick and ball game). Their enlargement and conjunction with the landscape creates a feeling of incongruity recalling the experience of dreams. In titling this work The Annunciation, Magritte may have been alluding ironically to the hostility towards Catholicism shown by the French Surrealists. But the title also suggests that something is about to happen, an expectation that is central to the eerie quality of this strange landscape".

"In its turn, Magritte's L'Anonciation (The Annunciation, 1930) contains no explicit reference to the passages in Luke's Gospel. Nor would Magritte have conceived the picture to operate on a theological level. Yet Paul Nougé, who likely titled the picture after Magritte sent him a sketch of it (Whitfield 55), understood its potential in those traditional terms. Magritte often asked for or permitted his friends to suggest titles for his pictures. His solicitation and acceptance of their ideas indicates the extent to which Magritte acknowledged his pictures' affective operation and the importance of reception as a vital contribution to the meaning of his art. In the case of L'Anonciation , it furthermore indicates Magritte's awareness of the Biblical narrative as an established and oft-illustrated subject for visual artists.

Taken apart from its title, however, Magritte's painting retains the potential to startle and mystify. As an example of Magritte's anachronistic realism, L'Anonciation is painted so that each detail is asserted with equal lucidity and imminence. A large portion of the painting's surface is occupied by the cluster of strange, vertically oriented elements that comprise its central focus. Hemmed in by shrubs and ragged boulders, these elements are obviously artificial, and may be taken as architectural (the grelots-adorned, metallic-looking screen), figural (especially the pair of bilboquets), and/or a combination of both (the pierced-paper screen). Dominant by dint of its scale, placement, and bold contrasts of light and dark, this bizarre cluster suggests a ruin akin to an ancient temple in the jungle (Whitfield 55). Another possibility is its resemblance to an abandoned commercial/industrial site, the sort stumbled upon in most urban areas. In any case, its monumentality and immediacy, beneath a muted, Netherlandish sky, stimulate wonder".

http://www.imageandnarrative.be/surrealism/tyson.htm


The Key of Dreams (1930)

Subject: In the "Key of Dreams," the signifier and the signified don't match up; word and concept don't agree. Under the picture of the shoe, for instance, is the French word for "moon," and under the black bowler hat is the French word for "snow." In this slippage between signifier and signified, Magritte points out the artificiality of the pictorial sign and the instability of language as a communicating system. What is the link between a word and the object, idea, or feeling it identifies? Signifiers take on meaning only by convention, not by any natural law or firm connection to the external world or the thing itself; there is no absolute foundation underlying language or sign systems. "Pain" in English signifies a hurt or suffering of some kind; in French, the very same signifier, "pain," means bread. As usual, Magritte's art makes us question the reality we take for granted. He messes with the system of things: his art points to an underlying disturbance rather than an underlying order (Mondrian).

Style: Magritte uses a realistic style to de-rail or sabotage reality. He employs a lucid dream technique by using an almost trompe-l'oeil style that on the surface seems innocent enough, but that covertly undermines the reality we take for granted. Without interfering with the shape of things, he interferes with the system of things. He is precisionist in technique, using a seemingly straightforward, descriptive, textbook style, not unlike a child's primer, but his content is always a disturbing riddle. Precision, rather than alleviating fear, ends up being the cause of added fear and apprehension. Trompe-l'oeil (trick of the eye) and trompe-l'esprit (trick of the mind) become his strategies for upsetting the assured mindset that we bring to viewing reality. And reality, as a result, turns out to be a much more complicated thing than we might have suspected. Magritte's highly realistic images end up undermining the authority and certainty of an external world; we start to suspect that the world might only be an extension of what is taking place inside our own heads. "We see the world as being outside ourselves, although it is only a mental representation of it that we experience inside ourselves." Magritte pits the rational, reasoning mind against the imaginative and fantastic with no way to resolve the conflict. He is determined to fight reason with its own weapons. Reason always tries to make things determinate, to pin them down definitively. His pictures resemble dreams of reason with a frightening precision that ends up backfiring, throwing reason itself, and reality, into question. Quite simply, he creates picture puzzles that cannot be solved or destroyed by reason alone.

Context: Magritte is a surrealist in the way his puzzling images undermine reason, language, and the reality we take for granted. His realistic style and surreal content place him in the camp of Dali and others who use reality against itself, as opposed to the more abstract dream imagery of Miro. Magritte lived in France for 3 years and was an active participant in Surrealism. His work is sometimes called "Magic Realism" in the way his precisionist, trompe-l'oeil style yields puzzling pictures that reason alone can neither solve or destroy. As with all the surrealists, his work touches on how reality itself might only be a dream and, conversely, how our dreams and desires are the stuff of which reality is made. "If the dream is a transcription of waking life, waking life is also a transcription of the dream."

http://www.csulb.edu/~karenk/

Magritte still waits to have a one-man exhibition. Paris is in the midst of recession. The effect of the economic crisis is all too apparent to the artist. His friend Goemans is forced to close his Paris gallery and collectors and galleries become bankrupt. Magritte no longer has a steady income and his relationship with Breton has deteriorated as a result of their different interpretaions of Surrealism and what path if any it is taking. Discouraged, he returns to Brussels and turns to commercial work.


1930-1939

A network of friends and sponsors support him and enable him to sustain his daily life and to exhibit on several occasions at the Palais des Beaux Arts. Magritte is able to pull through these difficult years. At the same time he is earning a reputation abroad and his work is being exhibited in one-man shows or in group shows with other Surrealists in London, New York and Paris. Magritte shares the Surrealist concept of the power of desire and eroticism to 'change life' and wants to translate this idea through his use of unconventional images.


He continues to involve metamorphosis in his work:


The Collective Invention (1934)

Magritte creates a new genetic order: living statues, birds that are leaves, men of stone, and sirens with the head of a fish and the legs of a woman, as in The Collective Invention (1934). These new species connote an inherent world mystery as well as a wry sense of humor. The Saudis picked up on this wry sense of humor when they sold thousands of postcards of The Collective Invention with a caption stating that this was the picture of a real siren washed up on a beach of Saudi Arabia.

In Black Magic (Magie Noire, 1933/34): a naked woman leaning on a rock gradually merges into the blue sky. The painter is, nevertheless, distrustful of the obvious seduction of 'pretty colors'.


The Red Model (1934, 1937)


"The Red Model,  with its virtually flat perspective and matter-of-fact style, consolidates two apparent opposites through an open visual riddle-an obvious metaphor. It shows inside and outside simultaneously. A few years earlier, in 1933, Magritte had painted a door that was open and closed at the same time, in The Unexpected Answer. The Human Condition, painted that same year, shows a landscape painting on an easel in front of a window facing the same landscape: the scene is both inside and outside at the same time. These paintings and The Red Model are thematically related. Magritte demonstrates how easily the viewer confuses the image, as a depiction, with the reality it both describes and obscures. His works are like a link between what is and what we see. Magritte expresses scepticism, doubt, and not always mild irony about the conditions of the mind".


In The Rape (1934)      
he even pushes it to the point of obsession with the features of a woman's face replaced by sexual attributes: breasts, belly button and pubic hair.
To avoid a scandal this painting is hidden by a velvet curtain at the Minotaure Exhibition in Brussels.


>>Subject: In "The Rape," Magritte makes use of the strategies of Freudian dream logic--displacement, condensation, and fetish--to create a disturbing image of the surrealists' favorite subject: woman, who Andre Breton called the "most marvelous and disturbing problem in all the world." The implication here is that she is marvelous precisely because she is so disturbing, so the "woman problem" was certainly not one the surrealists wanted to solve. And in images like "The Rape," they do a good job of making the woman appear as disturbing as possible. Here Magritte substitutes the woman's erotic zones for her facial features in a classic example of the surrealist aesthetic of "convulsive beauty." Breton had already proclaimed that "beauty must be convulsive or it will not be at all." Here the desiring body takes over the subject, or the subject--woman--becomes the projection for another's desire, that of the male surrealists. Magritte's pictures are always violent in some way; though he never really shows an act of violence, he does violence to our accepted ideas and conventions. Magritte messes with the system of things: his art points to an underlying disturbance rather than an underlying order (Mondrian). He is the secret agent man, the saboteur who sabotages our sense of security about the reality of appearances and the appearance of reality.

Style: Magritte uses a realistic style to de-rail reality. Without interfering with the shape of things, he interferes with the system of things. Here he makes bold use of the strategies of Freudian dream logic:
1) he exploits irrational juxtapositions by displacing the erotic zones from their normal context and re-situating them where they clearly do not belong; 2) he condenses two dissimilar things--the erotic zones with the woman's face--to form one composite image; and 3) he turns the woman's face into a highly eroticized fetish object. Magritte is precisionist in technique, using a seemingly straightforward, descriptive style, but his content is always a disturbing riddle. Precision, rather than alleviating fear, ends up being the cause of added fear and apprehension. Trompe-l'oeil (trick of the eye) and trompe-l'esprit (trick of the mind) become his strategies for upsetting the assured mindset that we bring to viewing reality. And reality, as a result, turns out to be a much more complicated thing than we might have suspected. Magritte's highly realistic images end up undermining the authority and certainty of an external world; we start to suspect that the world might only be an extension of what is taking place inside our own heads. "We see the world as being outside ourselves, although it is only a mental representation of it that we experience inside ourselves." Magritte pits the rational, reasoning mind against the imaginative and fantastic with no way to resolve the conflict. He is determined to fight reason with its own weapons. Reason always tries to make things determinate, to pin them down definitively. His pictures resemble dreams of reason with a frightening precision that ends up backfiring, throwing reason itself, and reality, into question. Quite simply, he creates picture puzzles that cannot be solved or destroyed by reason alone. <<

http://www.csulb.edu/~karenk/


"We approach to the love across the face and the love comes satisfied in the body.  For this reason the wonderful love is for the woman in its entirety, face and body together, nevertheless unmistakably  for her only.  The superimposition of the face with the torso instead (the bosoms look at you, the nose wastes away until to become the navel, the mouth-pube seems to twist itself in a tortured grimace) - far off to be the spiritualization of the body - means rather the humiliation of the sexual object: blinded, deaf and mute."  Magritte

A psychoanalytic essay at:

http://www.psychoanalysis.org.uk/budd.htm

>>It's an image he (Magritte) drew many times slightly differently, and which other artists have used as well, It's a much more disturbing picture; we expect to see a face and see something different. .....................................<<


The Human Condition (1933, 1935)


>>Subject: In the "Human Condition," reality is pitted against its representation to see how well they match up. The painting of a landscape is placed before the window that opens up onto the landscape and the two appear to line up perfectly, except for the nagging suspicion that the so-called reality against which we measure the painted representation is nothing but a representation itself. What is the relationship between reality and image? Magritte makes us question whether the external world we take for reality is not merely an image itself. He messes with the system of things: his art points to an underlying disturbance rather than an underlying order (Mondrian). "Pictorial experience which puts the real world on trial . . ." He is the secret agent man, the sabateur who sabotages our sense of security about the reality of appearances and the appearance of reality. <<

http://www.nga.gov/search/index.shtm


"The Human Condition displays an easel placed inside a room and in front of a window. The easel holds an unframed painting of a landscape that seems in every detail contiguous with the landscape seen outside the window. At first, one automatically assumes that the painting on the easel depicts the portion of the landscape outside the window that it hides from view. After a moment's consideration, however, one realizes that this assumption is based upon a false premise: that is, that the imagery of Magritte's painting is real, while the painting on the easel is a representation of that reality. In fact, there is no difference between them. Both are part of the same painting, the same artistic fabrication. It is perhaps to this repeating cycle, in which the viewer, even against his will, sees the one as real and the other as representation, that Magritte's title makes reference".

Clarvoyance (1936)

a self-portrait

  In the painting "Clairvoyance", he is seated at his easel painting a bird on a large canvas, while studying an egg that is poised in the foreground before him. He is painting an egg, but the egg is yet a bird.This self-portrait of the artist as a clairvoyant able to perceive the future eerily describes Magritte’s own exceptional, intuitive vision concerning the future of art.

1940


The 2nd World War is in full swing and the mighty German army has swept into Belgium. Magritte goes through a crisis resulting not just  from the German Occupation but his precarious financial situation and a dissatisfaction with his painting. He decides that a feeling of pleasure and an atmosphere of happiness has to predominate over the sense of anxiety and suffocation which had previously inhabited his work.
In order to show the 'bright side of life', Magritte thinks about changing his iconography and begins to paint leaf-birds.


1942

Leaf-birds are used in two works, Treasure Island and The Companions of Fear.


1943

He is struck by a reproduction of Pierre Auguste Renoir's Bathers which leads to a decisive transformation in his work. Enticed by the sensuality of the colors, he opts for a more luminous palette. While continuing to draw objects and figures with the meticulousness for which he has become known, he adds to them a touch clearly inspired by Impressionism, unleashing colour in new, warmer and more cheerful tonalities. Magritte calls this period his Sunlit period.


1947

 Phylosophy in the Boudoir (1947)

http://www.imageandnarrative.be/surrealism/stoltzfus.htm

>>Philosophy in the Boudoir (1947) salutes the Marquis de Sade. The undecidability of perception within this painting is typical of Magritte's art and we are hard put to choose between breasts and nightgown, between feet and shoes, between body parts that are alive and objects that are not.<<


Alexander Iolas, who became Magritte's principal dealer in the United States, successfully exhibits the artist's work in New York. Iolas then suggests that Magritte forget Renoir and focus his output on images which overwhelmingly appealed to the public, like Treasure Island. Obligated to come to terms with the necessities of life, Magritte creates new combinations out of old images.


1948

Completes Megalomania which reveals similarities with The Marches of Summer (1938-1939): a female torso (now in three parts), weightless cubes, blue sky with clouds and a parapet.


1949

Completes The Domain of Arnheim (1949), a work originally painted in 1936.

Surrealists attributed a privileged role to eggs and to stones. The Domain of Arnheim is a kindred painting in which the mountain resembles a bird. In the foreground is a nest of eggs, and the slippage of meaning between the stone bird and the eggs on the wall suggests that the mountain in the background might have laid them.


Magritte enjoys the game of juxtaposing and manipulating motifs. An image could exercise such powers of seduction that the painter felt compelled to reproduce it many times. Rather than falling into repetitive indifference, he excels in revisiting work in this way.
Nowhere is this more evident than in The Dominion of Light, an evocation of the simultaneous presence of day and night, a magnetization of the contradictions dear to the Surrealists. There are sixteen versions of this work.

"In Empire of Light, numerous versions of which exist (see, for example, those at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels), a dark, nocturnal street scene is set against a pastel-blue, light-drenched sky spotted with fluffy cumulus clouds. With no fantastic element other than the single paradoxical combination of day and night, René Magritte upsets a fundamental organizing premise of life. Sunlight, ordinarily the source of clarity, here causes the confusion and unease traditionally associated with darkness. The luminosity of the sky becomes unsettling, making the empty darkness below even more impenetrable than it would seem in a normal context. The bizarre subject is treated in an impersonal, precise style, typical of veristic Surrealist painting and preferred by Magritte since the mid-1920s".
(by Lucy Flint, Guggenheim Museum)


While René Magritte's art may have been frowned upon by some, his skill as a painter found him many admirers. In the late 1940s, Magritte experimented with a different technique, which he premiered at an exhibition at the Galerie du Faubourg, in Paris. Of course, by then, his fans had grown accustomed to his previous style, and did not appreciate the new direction he was taking. Discouraged by horrible reviews, he returned to his trademark technique, a sad bit of irony, especially in light of Magritte's contempt for the nostalgic.

1952


Les Valeurs Personnelles (Personal Values, 1952)

>>Subject: In "Personal Values," Magritte again makes use of the strategies of Freudian dream logic--displacement, condensation, and fetish--to create a disturbing image of reality. Here Magritte gives us an ambiguous jolt through strange displacements, odd juxtapositions, and disparities in scale. Magritte messes with the system of things: his art points to an underlying disturbance rather than an underlying order (Mondrian). "Pictorial experience which puts the real world on trial . . ." He is the secret agent man, the sabateur who sabotages our sense of security about the reality of appearances and the appearance of reality.

Style: Magritte uses a realistic style to de-rail reality. He employs a lucid dream technique by using an almost trompe-l'oeil style that on the surface seems innocent enough, but that covertly undermines the reality we take for granted. Without interfering with the shape of things, he interferes with the system of things. Here he makes bold use of the strategies of Freudian dream logic: 1) he exploits irrational displacements by bringing the outside sky into the inside room; 2) he condenses dissimilarly scaled things--intimate, personal objects rendered bigger than the furniture--to form one composite image; and 3) he turns these personal items into overcharged, overscaled fetish objects. The laws of space and scale, thus, correspond to personal desire (hence, the title, "Personal Values"). Magritte is precisionist in technique, using a seemingly straightforward, descriptive style, but his content is always a disturbing riddle. Precision, rather than alleviating fear, ends up being the cause of added fear and apprehension. Trompe-l'oeil (trick of the eye) and trompe-l'esprit (trick of the mind) become his strategies for upsetting the assured mindset that we bring to viewing reality. And reality, as a result, turns out to be a much more complicated thing than we might have suspected. Magritte's highly realistic images end up undermining the authority and certainty of an external world; we start to suspect that the world might only be an extension of what is taking place inside our own heads. "We see the world as being outside ourselves, although it is only a mental representation of it that we experience inside ourselves." Magritte pits the rational, reasoning mind against the imaginative and fantastic with no way to resolve the conflict. He is determined to fight reason with its own weapons. Reason always tries to make things determinate, to pin them down definitively. His pictures resemble dreams of reason with a frightening precision that ends up backfiring, throwing reason itself, and reality, into question. Quite simply, he creates picture puzzles that cannot be solved or destroyed by reason alone. destroyed by reason alone. <<

http://www.csulb.edu/~karenk/


"is a painting by Magritte that arguably shares an even closer relationship to the fifteenth-century pictures discussed above. Like the setting for van der Weyden's Annunciation , the room Magritte painted in Les valeurs personnelles constitutes a crowded stage whose compressed space is enlivened by the play of gentle light and shadow. Space further is opened up or loosened by inclusion of fragmentary additions or extensions. There is the window light's reflection from pale and shiny surfaces, including the wardrobe mirrors, those mirrors' reflection of the window and the outdoor space it reveals and, of course, the blue sky and puffy clouds of the walls. Magritte's spatial strategy recalls the ways in which van der Weyden and his peers employed views through windows and exterior doors, glimpses into other rooms, areas beneath bed canopies, and reflections in mirrors to add to and complicate the definition of simulated space. Other similarities between Magritte's picture and many of those from the fifteenth century include the neatly draped bed and the attention to detail in the floor, with its casually overlapped Oriental rugs. The pencil, the shaving brush stop the armoire, and the large pill or pod are placed with the matter-of-fact informality of details typical to Netherlandish pictures - from intricately tiled floors to smartly plumped pillows. And, although Mary is not sitting on her bed in the Annunciation paintings, Magritte's leaning comb suggests an acquiescent, Mary-analogue - while the looming, centrally situated goblet exhibits the imminence and aplomb of the angel, Gabriel. This reception is not an attempt to rationalize or interpret Magritte's picture in iconographical terms, but to describe what contributes to its mystery. The bed and wardrobe suggest peace and privacy, security and order. The goblet is a precipitous presence in their midst, along with other elements one might not expect to find in a bedroom - not on such a scale, at any rate. The effect of this picture is unsettling and the viewer, in accepting the possibility of being unsettled, experiences mystery".

http://www.imageandnarrative.be/surrealism/tyson.htm



1953

Among the works by Magritte which, beginning in the 1950's, definitively ensured his international recognition, one becomes the subject of extraordinary interest. In Golconda, Magritte brilliantly unites different motifs from his repertory: small men in overcoats and bowler hats float weightlessly in a blue sky in front of facades of houses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page


>>In Golconda, Magritte employs multiplication of a like image as a way to de-personalize. It appears like a late-afternoon downpour of bourgeois normality--each figure slightly different yet rendered anonymous by bowler hats and long coats. Magritte struggles against bourgeois cultural hegemony, yet he himself lived the life he mocks in his painting. After 1950, Magritte commonly appeared in photographs wearing a nondescript bowler hat like the subjects in his paintings.

        

He lived all of his later life in Brussels in a modest middle class dwelling, opting not to return to the artistic hub of Paris. As an explanation for Magritte's conventional lifestyle coupled with his unconventional paintings, George Melly, with the BBC, wrote, "He is a secret agent, his object is to bring into disrepute the whole apparatus of bourgeois reality. Like all saboteurs, he avoids detection by dressing and behaving like everybody else."<<

http://hem.passagen.se/paro1234/index2.html


Present since 1927, this bowler-hatted figure finally finds his true dimension. He becomes Magritte's emblem par excellence. He is present in many works after the 1950's.


In 1953 René Magritte is hired by the owner of the Casino of Knokke-le-Zoute, city of luxurious baths to the Flemish coast, to realize the panoramic frescos of the "Room of the luster".  This room is famous for his monumental luster, one of the bigger of Europe.  
Raoul Servais, painter and film director, in 1953 will work during several weeks with Magritte, the one that at this time is not yet the sacred monster of the paint of the 20th century, but already profits of an international aura.  

Raoul Servais


Raoul Servais (left) and René Magritte (third at right)

Under the direction of Raymond Art and with two other decorators and as much of attending, Servais receives for tries in June '53 to transpose in a form space circular the eight pictures to the oil realized by the "Master" the preceding month.  This "The domain delighted", under entitled "surrealist Panorama".  Magritte, always in suit three pieces, has a very high idea of his person.  Younger of the team, Servais succeeds in overcome his timidity and dares to do some order suggestions technical then chromatic to Magritte, that this one welcomes very poorly, to the point that Servais is sent back to have passed besides a refusal of the "Master".  It will be reintegrated to the team to the instance of Gustave Nellens, the director of the Casino.  
This relation rather contentious between the notable one Belgian Surrealist and a young muraliste that knows this that it wants, does not prevent. Used durably to be influenced by the universe of Magritte: Servais says himself fascinated to the era by a reproduction of The Red Model (1934, 1937), the  Magritte's canvas representing two "feet" that are also two shoes in front of a fence.  


1958

Completes The intimate Friend with bowler-hatted figure.


1959

The Castle of the Pyrenees (1959),

>>a painting of a rock in the sky, suspended over the sea in a kind of timelessness that defies gravity. The first lines are: “It begins with a stone falling, in the silence, vertically, immobile. It is falling from a great height, a meteor, a massive, compact, oblong block of rock, like a giant egg with a pocked, uneven surface.”
The rock resembles an egg - an egg that both generates the novel and contains it. Together, the picture and the text beget a visual and writerly process, and it is not by chance that the rock has an oval shape, because Surrealists attributed a privileged role to eggs and to stones. <<

1960

Visit to André Breton in Paris. Meeting with Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Man Ray.



1963


The Large Family

In this late Magritte's painting it is introduced the contour of a gigantic predator bird  in flight, that it nearly seems to be cut out  and glued to the sky. The marine landscape of the background is rendered with a melted and pictorial style more than how much it is not the idealized summery sky, limpid  like the crystal, than it is looked at in the shape of the bird. This is a picture that reassume many senses and reasons that rerun in all the Magritte's work: the realistic representation of the sky in an unreal atmosphere, the idea to use a contour in order to frame something of different from the same contour and finally the experimentation with different scales.

But  more than every other thing, this painting reassumes the theory of the "elective affinities", taken from the Ghoete's homonymous novel, than it is based on the conviction that the acquaintance is the acknowledgment of the
ties that join one thing to another thing, for which the bird in flight in the sky it becomes the same sky.


1964
Completes The Son of Man with bowler-hatted figure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page


>>Magritte was fascinated by the implications of hidden things in his paintings. Often he hid the subject's face from view, blocking it with a suspended object, a drape, or some other means. He de-personalizes the human subject by masking its individualizing identifier--the face. In a radio interview with Jean Neyens, Magritte discussed his use of the hidden in his painting, "The Son of Man": "At least it hides the face partly. Well, so you have the apparent face, the apple, hiding the visible but hidden, the face of the person. It's something that happens constantly. Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present." Magritte toys with the notion of object permanence, a form of conditioning we all experience as infants. Experience has taught us to presume that there is a face behind the apple, so, in turn, we readily imagine a continuity to fill in the masked area. Magritte wishes to call into question the ease with which we unconsciously "fill in" what is hidden and the unquestioned faith that we place in our suppositions.<<

http://hem.passagen.se/paro1234/index2.html

In later years, he was commissioned to create large canvasses for Edward James in London.



1965

The Blanck Check (1965)

"There is much that is clever here: the planking following different contours with shape and with its grain, but the wood is not a background and so seems gratuitous, not to mention producing an effect rather like an animal skin (tiger coat), so that the woman never mysteriously merges into something else and the texture applied to her doesn't look entirely like wood. The problem I think is in the outline: Magritte likes lines and outlines because they define objects and relatively clear planes in which the objects are located. That is, they help to define the visual contradictions and paradoxes that he set up for the viewer--his version of Breton's "the one in the other" game. (Magritte comes quite close to Escher at times. See his late "Blank Check".) If the outline of one object is broken by another object, we see that as occlusion, and locate the second object nearer to the viewer. Magritte's strong outline here thwarts all kinds of mythological associating with dryads and other people and spirits placed in wood or trees. To have background blend into foreground so that the foreground figure seems to emerge from the background subverts Magritte's rigor which feeds on violations of rules for the perceptual construction of scenes".


Magritte at a rodeo in Symington, Texas, December 1965

Large retrospective of Magritte's work is held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a clear manifestation of his worldwide recognition.

       

Magritte refers to his work of the latest period (1958-1965) as his 'found children'.




The iconographic elements, between them, in a reverting manner, finished by binding everything together in the last ten years of Magritte's life.

Magritte is in poor health, and exhausted from his travels. A year later, he spends Christmas and New Year's Eve in Cannes, with his beloved Georgette, and in 1967, he has a retrospective in Rotterdam, Holland, and an exhibit at the Iolas Gallery in Paris.
On August 15th, 1967, at the age of 69, Magritte dies in Brussels. Throughout his entire career, René Magritte had created over a thousand paintings, not to mention the numerous photographs, and essays which he published in art magazines. Like Salvador Dali, Magritte's work will forever come to mind when we hear the word "surreal".
"Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist."
(Rene Magritte)

_______________________________________________


Philosophical and artistic gestures

A consummate technician, his work frequently displays a juxtaposition of ordinary objects, or an unusual context, giving new meanings to familiar things. The representational use of objects as other than what they seem is typified in his painting, The Treachery Of Images (La trahison des images), which shows a pipe that looks as though it is a model for a tobacco store advertisement. Magritte painted below the pipe, This is not a pipe (Ceci n'est pas une pipe), which seems a contradiction, but is actually true: the painting is not a pipe, it is an image of a pipe. (In his book, This Is Not a Pipe, French critic Michel Foucault discusses the painting and its paradox.)
Note that Magritte pulled the same "stunt" in a painting of an apple: he painted the fruit realistically and then used an "internal" caption or framing device to deny that the item was an apple. It might be true that Magritte's point in these Ceci n'est pas works is that no matter how closely, through realism-art, we come to depicting an item accurately, we never do catch the item itself, per se, as a "Kantian noumenon", but capture only an image on the canvas. But that interpretation trivializes Magritte's insight -- for it is true of any painting, and every artist and child would admit it, that what the painting does is only present an image of a thing, and the thing itself is not on or in the canvas.


It might be more plausible to interpret Magritte as commenting on Freudian psychoanalysis, a topic not very far removed from many of his surrealistic works. Sigmund Freud, especially in his dream analysis, continually asserted that what clearly and obviously seemed to be an X in a dream was not really an X, that it was an X only patently, on the surface, but not latently or deeply, that the X in the dream represented or was a metaphor for some other thing, Y. The dream-image train is really a penis, for example. So when Magritte says, "This is not a pipe," what he means is that it may be possible to think that it is only an image that stands for something else, that the phenomenal reality of the pipe obscures or hides the true reality lying underneath. The difficult question, if we go this far, is whether Magritte intended to provide support for or to illustrate sympathetically Freudian dream analysis -- the treachery of dreams -- or, instead, was mocking it: "You mean this image, which is obviously a pipe-image, is not really a pipe-image? Tell me another!"
His art shows a more representational style of surrealism compared to the "automatic" style seen in works by artists like Joan Miró. In addition to fantastic elements, his work is often witty and amusing. He also created a number of surrealist versions of other famous paintings.

Text from "Rene Magritte", by Abraham Marie Hammacher:

"René Magritte was no doubt disappointed that, aside from the small circle of his kindred spirits among the Surrealists, the world needed over a quarter of a century to discover that his work has both philosophical and poetic content which corresponds to certain social and intellectual trends, particularly of the second half of the twentieth century. Magritte's work was not easy to approach at the outset, however. He is a difficult painter, and his simplicity is misleading. A world ever more disturbed and unstable - in labor, trade, and industry, as well as in intellectual and university circles - is a world in which reason remains indispensable. Yet the irrational no longer allows itself to be thrust aside, and today it is struggling to win recognition. As a result, there is now a greater possibility, especially among the younger generation, to arrive at a better and deeper understanding of Magritte's art.

"His work makes a constant call on us to relinquish, at least temporarily, our usual expectations of art. Magritte never responds to our demands and expectations. He offers us something else instead. His friend Paul Nougé has expressed the problem better than anyone else; what he said in 1944 still holds good: "We question pictures," he said, "before listening to them, we question them at random. And we are astonished when the reply we had expected is not forthcoming."

"Magritte's work allows one to conjure up a state of being which has become rare and precious - which makes it possible to observe in silence. Reading and reflection call for silence, listening no less. Silence can be used for waiting for an illumined vision of things, and it is to this vision that Magritte introduces us.
...

"The fascinating and challenging images in Magritte's works stem from revelations of the mystery of the visible world. To him this world was a more than adequate source of lucid revelations, so that he did not need to draw on dreams, hallucinations, occult phenomena, cabalism. Nonetheless, preconsciousness - that is, the state before and during waking up - always played an important role in his work.

"In studying Magritte one begins to understand that attempting to solve puzzles must be avoided but the artist himself provides clues to his manner of painting and the mental process on which it is founded. Some are inclined to call this process "visual thinking. I prefer to give it no name. The term "visual thinking" is not subtle enough and involves too many misunderstandings regarding the possible subordination of the visual to thought, or vice versa. The misunderstanding caused by calling Magritte "cerebral" has also been demonstrated all too often, despite the unusually large quantity of literary, philosophical, and linguistic affinities Magritte's work suggests, and which bring us closer to their meaning. Also the term "literary" is a misconception in his case, although it is understandable because of the literary origins of the leading figures in Surrealism. Let us refrain, then, from favoring one formula or the other and instead take a frank look to see with whom, and with what, Magritte and his marvelous cabinet of instruments can be compared.

"The author who wishes to show complete respect for the struggle Magritte waged against faulty interpretations and explanations - and it was indeed a struggle - nevertheless finds he has to ignore Magritte's own personal ban. Even Magritte himself attempted to explain why he wanted no explanations.
"His pronounced hostility to the idea of the symbol in relation to his work, his undisguised dislike of psychoanalysis in particular, and his distrust of any and every interpretation naturally had reasons. He was defending the very essence of his work by adopting this attitude. If, therefore, we try to understand something of the meaning of his resistance - and Magritte never forbade us to attempt that - we shall come closer to his work by this roundabout way.

"Seeing, says Magritte, is what matters. Seeing must suffice. But what kind of seeing must it be? Of what quality? A form of understanding is possible beyond the confines of any verbal explanation, which, if it is of any use at all, must be authenticated by a way of seeing. Unfortunately, for a large proportion of the public, seeing is not sufficient. People often see things hastily and think about them carelessly; they have been educated in disciplines and traditions in which words represent ideas and have a dominant function. This function has left the realm of revelation beyond words neglected and unexplored.

"Magritte, who was a painter and a painter tout court, albeit an unusual one, was nevertheless more aware than any of his contemporaries of words and of the dubious status they had acquired. His consciousness of words is evident in both his writings and paintings. Dealing with words was a dangerous game to play, though, for by playing it he introduced the element "Word" into his painted "images." Thus, anyone seriously concerned with Magritte's work cannot avoid taking a thorough account of what Magritte sought of words in his work and of the value he attached to them.

"The simplicity in his work is a suspect simplicity. In his writings - which include general articles, a few literary pieces, and special articles on specific themes - and in the titles he gave to his works, Magritte was methodical, as he was in his painting. The unexpected is never mere caprice. Moreover, it resides not so much in Magritte as in ourselves. We are not prepared for, and we do not instantly grasp, his technique of thinking and painting. It is not recalcitrance on his part but a natural need to react to the stereotype phenomena of everyday life in a way contrary to expectation; it is a need to correct. What is more, in Magritte's work this became a discipline of feeling, thinking, and behaving which he discovered and evolved for himself. Accordingly, his method - others feel it was a discipline - is as valid a subject for our inquiry as the works themselves.

"Magritte attempted, as it were, to achieve a controlled resonance in his work. After he had finished a painting, it set up a resonance within him, in which he involved his closest friends. This resonance in the artist himself was necessarily different from that in us, who are the uninitiated in regard to his pictorial and verbal imagery. Yet, despite everything, Magritte probably attached more than usual importance to having people feel the right kind of resonance. That he could do anything about this himself was an illusion; the others were the critics, the art historians, the museums, the art dealers, the collectors, who play their own game with a variety of intentions.

"More often than not, Magritte chose ordinary things from which to construct his works - trees, chairs, tables, doors, windows, shoes, shelves, landscapes, people. He wanted to be understood via these ordinary things. Those who find him obscure should not forget that he had turned his back on the fantastic and on the immediate world of dreams. He did not seek to be obscure. On the contrary, he sought through a therapy of shock and surprise to liberate our conventional vision from its obscurity.

"...[L]et us therefore keep, so far as we can, to Magritte himself, to his own resonance, to his method. Even though his is a complex, sophisticated world in which we often lose sight of simplicity, we are able to find this simplicity again in the works themselves, a fact that can only increase our astonishment."

______________________


"Though he was a prodigiously talented draftsman, René Magritte was in essence a cerebral painter; his canvases served as vehicles for the translation of abstract ideas into visual form. He obsessively replicated his previous paintings, ever attempting to resolve the expression of a particular idea through the introduction of subtle compositional changes. Such ideas were plentiful, and Magritte was consequently an extraordinarily prolific painter, creating more than a thousand canvases over the course of his fifty-year career.  Magritte's paintings have an emphasis on recurring themes, including voyeurism, language, metamorphosis, enchantment, disjunction of images, and the fracturing of perception.

Unlike the French Surrealists he came to know during his stay in Paris from 1927 to 1930, Magritte and his cohorts of friends scorned the appropriation of Freudian theories in art and literature. He disdained the explorations of the unconscious mind that were in vogue throughout Europe in this era, aiming instead to expand conscious understanding of reality by presenting utterly improbable tableaux. The fantastic compositions that resulted were made more palatable -- and, paradoxically, even more absurd -- by Magritte's strict adherence to the conventions of representational painting.

Rather than paint the visible world, Magritte created inverse worlds, carrying us with him through the looking glass in search of bizarre hybrid forms, objects of absurd scale, and distortions of the laws of time and space. He reveled in making the banal appear strange, tearing objects from their usual contexts and transplanting them into utterly incongruous spaces. His legacy is perhaps most strongly felt in the work of contemporary Pop and Postmodern artists, who borrow familiar images and icons from our collective cultural landscape and present them in an entirely new context, thereby infusing them with new weight and meaning. Magritte painted in the chasm between our vision of the world and the world itself, between our attempts to rationalize every phenomenon, and the absurdity that continues to pervade life despite all efforts to suppress it".

Adrienne Gagnon
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
SFMOMA Curatorial Associate
www.sfmoma.org
__________________________

Another interesting essay at:

http://www.imageandnarrative.be/surrealism/tyson.htm


"The aspect of Réne Magritte's oeuvre that best fits into conventional definitions of surrealism is that of unrelated objects brought into juxtaposition, such that they provoke a realization of mystery in the midst of daily life. However, this writing proposes that the mystery in Magritte's pictures stems from an older, Low Countries tradition of simulated, mysterious encounters - namely that of the private devotional painting. In order to link painters and paintings from the fifteenth century with an artist and pictures from the twentieth century, “The persistence of mystery” cites cultural traits - notable among them, a fondness for home life - that would establish continuity between the two groups of work in respect to their intentional conception and potential reception".

"The Belgian painter René Magritte “comes from a specific artistic climate,” that nurtures a “tradition of transcendent quietists - painters such as Van Eyck and Memling.” Thus Dore Ashton wrote in a 1959 New York Times review of two gallery exhibitions for the artist, who died in 1967. Ashton further noted a “strange Flemish personality” that exerts a “persistent, hallucinating power.” In Magritte's art, “the viewer has the feeling that something takes places that he cannot name.” (Ashton 28) Ashton's reference to a regional climate that nurtures a persistent mystery or, perhaps, surrealism in fifteenth-century Netherlandish pictures and, five hundred years later, Magritte's art is not unique. Many articles on Magritte, written during the mid-twentieth century for a broad swath of educated American readers, linked his images to a region whose linguistic, religious, artistic, and political culture is far more complicated than such articles could admit".

"Perhaps because of this complexity and her modernist scorn of easy interpretation, another critic summarily dismissed any such connection between Magritte's art and the region in which it was made: in her 1970 landmark monograph on Magritte, Suzi Gablik tersely stated that attempts to situate Magritte's oeuvre in a Flemish artistic tradition “cannot be pursued to advantage.” There is “in some of Magritte's pictures that sense of eternality, of time suspended, which recalls the hermetic quietism associated with Memling, Van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden,” Gablik conceded. “Present also is an analogous interest in ordinary objects and domestic interiors. But these tracks do not lead very far.” (Gablik 13) Gablik, whose research on Magritte included an eight-month stay with the artist and his wife, Georgette, paired her own opinion with a quote she had obtained from Magritte, himself, effectively aligning their views. Magritte stated: “ ‘Grouping artists … because they are “Walloons” or because they might be, for example, “vegetarians,” doesn't interest me at all … .' ” (Gablik 13)

"Thus, on one hand, stands an example of reception of Magritte's work that embraces him as heir to a regional tradition of mystery and, on the other, two authoritative and rather autocratic dismissals of the possibility . Situated between these two opinions, however, is another possibility - a case for considering Magritte as a regional artist. How can Magritte be addressed as an artist who worked within some parameters associated with the culture of a particular geographical location? How can pictures made during the fifteenth century and pictures made during the twentieth century fruitfully be compared as manifestations of regional culture? Or, can the work of one of Belgian's foremost painters be situated within a context other than that of Parisian surrealism - which continues to be perceived as definitive of the international practice? This essay will situate Magritte's work within a regional context, by demonstrating that both Magritte and the Netherlandish painters used visual motifs and strategies that would affect their viewers in comparable ways, consistent with certain characteristics of regional culture - in spite of five hundred years elapsing between the occasions of their conception. However, demonstrating such comparable means and intentions requires consideration of some related issues, among them, Magritte's resistance to classification as a regional artist. Magritte's comments about “vegetarian” artists suggest that, even after he had achieved international renown, he was concerned about any categorization that could limit appreciation of his art. Placing his art in a regional context would have become one more way of explaining its meaning - psychoanalysis would be another - and Magritte considered any attempt to decipher the mystery of his art as wrong-headed".
...........................................................
...........................................................

"Another important consideration is that of ‘mystery', the word most commonly employed to describe the effect of Magritte's imagery. What is meant by this term, which often has been used to describe the effect of works by Magritte and the Netherlandish painters? Can mystery be defined in such a way as to establish a basis of comparison between the two groups of pictures? As the OED states, ‘mystery' has two kinds of definition. Theologically, it is “usually, a doctrine of faith involving difficulties which human reason is incapable of solving.” Non-theologically, it is “something beyond human knowledge or comprehension; a riddle or enigma.” The two kinds of mystery differ in their origins, yet both resist reason and comprehension; mystery is to be accepted and experienced as necessarily and rewardingly unknowable. If mystery is thus defined, why has it been employed as an effect in these bodies of work? One possibility might be that all of the artists in question, in spite of diverging religious and secular motivations, sought to make pictures that would evoke mystery in the midst of everyday life. In doing so, they might stimulate wonder in viewers tempted by or preoccupied with domestic comfort, security, and privilege. The means they chose for achieving this end was the realistic painting of ordinary objects and/or everyday settings - in ways that eluded rational explanation. As such, focus is shifted from what pictures are supposed to mean to how pictures are intended to operate. For decades, meaning has informed reception of Magritte's pictures and the Netherlandish paintings. But recent scholarly writing about both bodies of work supports the potential for fruitful comparison of their functional operation".

_________________________

René Magritte described his paintings by saying,

My painting is visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, 'What does that mean?'. It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.

_________________________________________

In popular culture

On the Threshold of Liberty, 1937.
The Jeff Beck group reproduced Magritte's "The Listening Room" on the cover of their 1969 album Beck-Ola.
Rock band Styx adapted Magritte's 1965 piece Carte Blanche for the cover of their album The Grand Illusion.
The music video for Todd Rundgren's 1981 song "Time Heals" features in the background numerous paintings by Magritte and by Salvador Dalí.
The covers of the albums The Pleasure Principle by Gary Numan and The Pleasures of Electricity by John Foxx were based on Magritte's painting Le Principe du Plaisir.
In the UK TV series Sapphire & Steel, (in the untitled fourth serial), the appearance of the faceless spirit, and of the photos he hides inside, are based on Magritte's works.
Paul Simon writes of René and Georgette Magritte in Christopher Street in New York with his song René and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War, on the 1983 album Hearts and Bones.
Playwright Barry Kornhauser wrote a play about Magritte's early life, This Is Not a Pipe Dream, which was published in 1993.
In the 2004 film I Heart Huckabees, Magritte is referenced by Bernard Jaffe (Dustin Hoffman) as he holds onto a bowler hat. This particular hat is a recurring element of Magritte's work, appearing in The Son of Man and Golconda.
The Son of Man was used in the 1999 film The Thomas Crown Affair and in the 2004 short film Ryan. According to the Beatles Anthology, the apple in the Apple Records logo was designed to resemble the one in this Magritte painting.
In the 1992 film Toys, using Magritte-inspired imagery, Robin Williams and Joan Cusack make a fake music video of "The Mirror Song" by Trevor Horn and Bruce Wooley. The song was acted in the video by Williams and Cusack using the pseudonyms "Yolanda and Steve." They wore bowler hats and overcoats while the video imagery referenced The Son of Man and Golconda. For the latter, the little bowler-hatted figures were shown slowly descending.
Demeter Fragrances, known for their unique scents, has a scent called "This is not a Pipe" named after the painting "ceci n'est pas une pipe".
Indie rock band Recover titled their 2002 album "Ceci n'est pas." The album cover features a picture of the band on a background similar to The Treachery of Images; "Ceci n'est pas Recover" is written under the picture in a font similar to that of the painting.
The cover of the album "Casually Dressed & Deep in Conversation" by the Welsh Emocore band Funeral for a Friend is based on the two paintings "The Lovers" [1] by Magritte.
The cover of Australian band Expatriate's "lovers le strange" E.P. [2] is also based on "The Lovers".
On the set of the television show Good Eats, there is a painting over a fireplace of a turkey floating in front of a sky background with a bowler hat floating above it, an obvious reference to Magritte's painting "The Son of Man".
On his 2003 album Hobo Sapiens, John Cale (former member of The Velvet Underground) included a song titled "Magritte". The song pays homage to the artist, through such lines as "And how often we forgot Magritte / How we remembered him then / And worshipped at his feet / Pinned to the edges of vision."
The cover of Jackson Browne's 1974 album, Late for the Sky, is inspired by Magritte's "L'Empire des Lumieres."
The 2005 album cover, Frances The Mute by The Mars Volta was inspired by "L'Empire des Lumieres" as well.

Paul McCartney is a life-long fan of Magritte and owns many of his paintings. His wife Linda bought him Magritte's easel for a birthday present. He claims that Magritte's Apple painting inspired him to use the name Apple for the company that dealt with the Beatle's business.

In the 2006 film Stranger than Fiction, protagonist Harold Crick,a dull businessman, carries a green apple in his mouth as he heads to work at the start of the film; the loss of the apple plays a part in the resolution of the film.

Magritte's work has apparently also inspired MTV jingle during the early 90s, with the paintings "ceci n'est pas une pomme" and "ceci n'est pas une pipe", referring to the MTV slogan "ceci est MTV".

Alan Hull of UK folk-rock band Lindisfarne used Magritte's paintings on two of his solo albums. 1973's 'Pipedream' and 1979's 'Phantoms'. 'La Lampe Philosophique' is reproduced for the cover of Pipedream. In addition, the same painting inspired the song 'Peter Prophy Don't Care', recorded for the band's 1971 LP Fog on the Tyne ('Your nose is in your pipe...').



Selected list of works

1920 Landscape
1922 The Station
1923 Sixth Nocturne
1925 The Bather and The Window
1926 The Lost Jockey, The Mind of the Traveler, Sensational News, The Difficult Crossing, The Vestal's Agony, The Midnight Marriage, The Musings of a Solitary Walker, After the Water the Clouds and The Encounter
1927 The Meaning of Night, Let Out of School, The Murderer Threatened, The Man from the Sea, The Tiredness of Life, The Light-breaker, A Passion for Light, The Menaced Assassin and The Muscles of the Sky
1928 The Lining of Sleep, Intermission, The Flowers of the Abyss, Discovery, The Lovers I & II [3] [4], The Daring Sleeper, The Acrobat’s Ideas, The Automaton, The Empty Mask and Attempting the Impossible
1929 The Treachery of Images, Threatening Weather and On the Threshold of Liberty
1930 Pink Belles, Tattered Skies, The Eternally Obvious, The Lifeline, The Annunciation and Celestial Perfections
1931 The Voice of the Air, Summer and The Giantess
1932 The Universe Unmasked
1933 The Human Condition and The Unexpected Answer
1934 The Rape
1935 The Discovery of Fire, The Human Condition, Revolution, Perpetual Motion, Collective Invention', The False Mirror and The Portrait
1936 Clairvoyance, The Healer, The Philosopher’s Lamp, Spiritual Exercises and Forbidden Literature
1937 The Future of Statues and The Black Flag
1938 Time Transfixed and Steps of Summer
1939 Victory
1940 The Return, The Wedding Breakfast
1941 The Break in the Clouds
1942 Misses de L’Isle Adam and The Misanthropes
1943 Universal Gravitation and Monsieur Ingres’s Good Days
1944 ? The Domain of Arnheim
1945 Treasure Island and Black Magic
1947 The Cicerone, The Liberator, The Fair Captive and The Red Model
1948 Blood Will Tell, Memory, The Mountain Dweller, The Art of Life, The Pebble, The Lost Jockey (1948) and Famine
1949 Megalomania, Elementary Cosmogany and Perspective, the Balcony
1950 Making an Entrance, The Legend of the Centuries, Towards Pleasure, The Labors of Alexander and The Art of Conversation
1951 David’s Madame Récamier, Pandora's Box, The Song of the Violet, The Spring Tide and The Smile
1952 Personal Values
1953 Golconda, The Listening Room and a fresco for the Knokke Casino
1954 The Invisible World and The Empire of Light
1955 Memory of a Journey and The Mysteries of the Horizon
1956 The Sixteenth of September
1957 The Fountain of Youth
1958 The Golden Legend
1959 The Castle in the Pyrenees, The Battle of the Argonne, The Anniversary and The Glass Key
1960 The Memoirs of a Saint
1962 The Great Table, The Healer, 'Waste of Effort and Mona Lisa (circa 1962)
1963 The Great Family, The Open Air, The Beautiful Season, Princes of the Autumn, Young Love and The Telescope
1964 Evening Falls, The Great War, The Son of Man and Song of Love
           1965 Carte Blanche and Ages Ago

1966 The Shades, The Happy Donor, The Gold Ring, The Pleasant Truth and The Mysteries of the Horizon
1967 Good Connections, The Art of Living and several bronze sculptures based on Magritte’s previous works.


http://www.famouspainter.com/rene.htm

_____________________________________


Assuming:

Map of the Heavens, Planets, Astrological Chart, Horoscope
René MAGRITTE,
born November 21, 1898 at 7:30 AM in Lessines (Belgique)
Sun in 29°03 Scorpio, AS in 1°34 Sagittarius,
Moon in 6°45 Pisces, MC in 26°19 Virgo

http://www.astrotheme.fr/en/portraits/B44GcRMFb64d.htm



Using RIYAL 2.60

Astrological Setting (Tropical - Placidus)

RIYAL  Mon November 21 1898  UT 7h30m00s  Lat50n43  Lon3e50   SORT ALL     

Planet
Longit.
Latitude
Declin.
Const.
H.D.
Period
Inclin.
O.Range
RD215
0Sa00
13n56
6s31
Oph
76.8
1373
25.8
[38..209]
Okyrhoe
0Pi04  
4n49
6s57
Aqr
11.0
24
15.6
[6..11]  
MW12
0Vi05    
12s22
0s09
Sex
50.2  
310
21.5
[40..52]
UX25
1Cp02
17n53
5s34  
Ser     
47.8
281
19.4  
[37..49]
Ascend
1Sa35  
0n00  
20s29
Sco
Huya
1Ge41 r
15s11
5n37    
Tau
50.2
246
15.5  
[28..50]
RL43
1Ge48 r
12s36
8n11  
Tau
24.5
121  
12.3  
[23..25]
CR105
1Ar54 r
19s17
16s53
Cet  
68.8
3143  
22.8  
[44..385]
Alekto
1Ar56 r  
5n17
5n37
Psc  
3.6   
0
0.0
[0..0]
TX300
2Sc06
23s45  
34s16
Cen
42.6
288
25.8  
[38..49]
XX143
2Pi08
5s39
15s59
Aqr  
9.8
76
6.8
[10..26]
RN43
2Li12
1s33
2s18
Vir
42.5
270
19.2  
[41..42]
Chaos
2Aq21
11s31
30s50   
Mic  
50.2
310  
12.0
[41..50]
Heracles
2Pi47
6n24
4s30
Aqr
3.2   
2
9.7
[0..3]  
Chiron
2Sa50
3n34
17s14
Sco
9.6   
50
7.0  
[8..19]
GZ32
2Sc59
13n52
0n33
Vir  
19.2   
112
15.0
[18..28]
Typhon
3Pi13
0s41
10s58
Aqr
57.8
232  
2.4
[17..58]
Uranus
3Sa31
0n08
20s45
Sco
18.9
85
0.8
Pallas
4Li18
5s51
7s05
Vir   
2.2   
5
34.7
[2..3]
Vesta
4Cp43
0s36
23s58
Sgr
2.2
4   
7.1
[2..3]  
PJ30
4Le55 r  
1s08
17n57
Cnc  
70.2
1395
5.6
[29..221]
Echeclus
4Li57
0n34
1s27  
Vir
13.8
34
4.3
[6..15]  
Eunomia
5Cp14
0s57  
24s17
Sgr
2.6   
0   
0.0   
[0..0]
Urania
5Ar17
3n14
5n04
Psc  
2.1
0  
0.0
[0..0]  
KF77
5Pi32
2s31
11s50
Aqr   
21.8   
132
4.4
[20..32]
DH5
5Vi33
1s39
7n57  
Leo
14.4
104
22.5
[14..30]
TO66
5Sc37
18s26
30s39   
Cen  
38.3  
288
27.4
[38..49]
Dioretsa
5Ta45 r   
20s03
5s31
Cet
26.8  
0
0.0  
[0..0]
Elatus
5Sa48
1n53
19s25
Sco
14.5
45   
5.6
[7..18]
DonQuixote
5Le55 r
25n33
43n21  
Lyn
7.1
9  
28.7
[1..7]
RR43
6Sa23
9n17
12s14
Oph   
45.5   
286
28.5
[38..49]
Icarus
6Cp31
15s29
38s45
CrA
0.7
1
23.1
[0..2]
Mars
6Le35
2n10
20n44
Cnc    
1.6
2
1.9
Quaoar
6Le42 r
7s08
11n42  
Cnc  
44.5
286
8.0  
[42..45]
Moon
6Pi45
4n22    
4s59
Aqr
1.0
0
5.2
VQ94
6Ar45 r
51s33   
43s35
Phe
111.6
2580  
71.0
[7..369]
SB60
6Li46
23s32
24s10
Crt
38.5   
276  
23.9
[38..47]
HB57
7Ca01 r
15s25
7n52
Mon
91.2  
2044
15.5  
[38..284]
Aglaja
7Vi19
3n30
12n05
Leo
3.3
0
0.0  
[0..0]  
Sedna
7Ar20 r
8s30
4s53
Cet  
132.9
10633
12.0
[76..891]
Chariklo
7Aq43
4n54
13s36  
Aqr
17.2    
63  
23.4
[13..18]
AW197
7Ta45 r
24n18
36n51
And
53.0
322  
24.4
[41..53]
Nessus
8Pi06 r
12s10
19s47
Aqr  
29.4
122
15.7
[12..37]
Phaethon
8Ca18 r
15n56
39n05
Aur   
1.4
1
21.5
[0..2]
GB32
9Ca04 r
13s57  
9n13
Mon
98.4  
3047
14.2
[35..385]
Astraea
9Pi11
3s41
11s33  
Aqr
2.9
0
0.0
[0..0]
Node
9Cp24 r
0n00
23s07  
Sgr
BU48
9Sa47
12n19  
9s45
Oph
45.0  
193
14.3  
[21..46]
Apollo
10Le03 r
8n34   
25n58
Cnc  
1.7
2
6.4
[1..2]  
FP185
10Ge06r
29s52
7s36
Eri  
93.0
3182
30.9  
[34..399]
TL66  
10Cp23
21n41
1s25
Aql
76.1
761
23.9
[35..131]
RM43
10Cp31
9s24
32s25
Sgr
79.7
859
28.7
[35..145]
UR163
10Sc36
0s43
15s41  
Lib
42.1  
376
0.7
[37..67]
Psyche
10Sa53
2n17
19s50
Oph
3.1
0
0.0  
[0..0]
AZ84
10Pi57 r
13n39
5n10  
Peg
36.7  
247
13.6
[32..46]
OX3
12Li03   
3s05  
7s36
Vir     
41.3
182  
3.2
[18..46]
CZ118
12Ca07r
25n07
47n52
Lyn
96.5
1243
27.7
[37..194]
FZ53
12Sa27
27n45
5n14
Oph
25.5
117  
34.8
[12..35]
Orcus
12Pi29 r
20n16   
11n51
Peg  
30.5
245
20.6  
[30..48]
Sappho
12Sc33
0s15  
15s51
Lib
2.6
0
0.0
[0..0]
Pelion
12Sa49
7n04  
15s20  
Oph
17.6
90
9.4
[17..23]
Thereus
12Ar50 r
3n14
8n03
Psc
11.1  
38
20.2
[9..14]
Saturn
12Sa56  
1n25
20s57
Oph
10.0
30   
2.5
Ceres
13Li01  
8n37
2n47
Vir
2.6
5  
10.6
[3..3]
RZ215
13Li02
14s09
18s09  
Crv     
81.3
1047  
25.4
[31..175]
Crantor
13Ca05r
3s30
19n19   
Gem    
19.6
86
12.8
[14..25]
OO67
13Sc14
19n43
3n01
Ser
106.2
14458
20.1
[21..1166]
OP32
13Vi23
9s41
2s25
Sex  
42.8
286
27.1  
[39..48]
Logos
13Ar23 r
2s38
2n52
Psc     
44.8
301
2.9
[40..50]
Asbolus
13Le40 r
14n30  
30n34
Leo
27.2
76
17.6
[7..29]  
Amfortas
13Sc50
2n14
13s52
Lib  
2.0
0
0.0
[0..0]
RZ214
13Sc59
3n55
12s19    
Lib
65.9  
790
20.4
[37..134]
FZ173
14Ge21r  
12n19
34n46
Aur
82.2
787  
12.7
[32..138]
SA278
14Aq29      
9n14
7s39
Aqr   
95.2
880
16.3
[33..151]
Hekate
14Vi38
2n11
8n04
Leo
3.5
0
0.0
[0..0]   
Varuna
14Aq44
11s13
27s07
PsA
41.3
281
17.2
[41..45]
Pluto
15Ge00r   
10s04
12n36
Ori
47.1
247
17.2
[29..49]
Venus
15Sa10r   
3s24
26s00
Oph  
0.7
1
3.4
TC302
15Aq12
32s36
46s56  
Gru
69.1
410
35.1  
[39..71]
Hygiea
15Vi12
2s26
3n36  
Leo
3.1
0
0.0
[0..0]  
Vertex
15Ca15
WL7
15Aq19
7s55
23s48
Cap
21.2
90
11.2
[15..25]
PN34  
15Ca33r
3n56
26n28
Gem
47.2
172
16.6
[13..49]
UJ438
16Cp04
1n31
20s59   
Sgr
26.9
74
3.8  
[8..27]
GM137
16Ar05 r
16s06
8s32
Cet
9.2  
23
15.6
[7..9]
Flora
16Sa11
1n57
20s47
Oph
2.4
0
0.0
[0..0]
Mercury
16Sa47
2s20
25s07
Oph
0.4
0
7.0
FY9
16Ta54 r
16s16
1n15  
Cet  
38.9
304
29.0
[38..52]
YQ179
16Ar58 r
21s03
12s47
Cet
84.5
824
20.9
[37..139]
VS2
17Sa23  
10s04
32s52
Sco
42.1  
249
14.8  
[37..42]
Eurydike
18Le10  
4n48
19n57
Leo
3.2
0
0.0
[0..0]
QB243
18Ge38r
6n31
29n27
Aur
53.8
203
6.8
[15..54]
Pylenor
18Vi41
2n36  
6n52
Leo
18.4
69
5.4  
[12..22]
Orpheus
19Aq10
0n16
14s49
Cap   
1.3
1
2.7
[1..2]
VR130
19Ca13r
3s31  
18n35
Gem   
17.8  
117   
3.5
[15..33]
Cyllarus
19Le56 r
12n40
26n49  
Leo    
32.8
134
12.6
[16..36]
Megaira
20Sa06
2n02
21s04
Oph
2.7
0
0.0
[0..0]
Apogee
20Ge11   
1n43
24n48
Tau
QD112
20Le29
9n48
23n56
Leo
21.8
83
14.5
[8..30]  
XZ255
20Sc36  
1n06  
16s51  
Lib  
16.3
64  
2.6
[15..17]
Pholus
20Ge45r
18s08
5n02    
Ori
9.4    
91
24.7  
[9..32]
Ceto
21Pi12 r
0s31
3s58
Aqr
84.2
998
22.4
[18..182]
Eris
21Pi13 r
33s20
33s42
Scl
91.8
558
44.1
[38..98]
Euphrosyne
21Aq15
21s34   
34s41   
PsA
3.3
0
0.0
[0..0]
Damocles
21Aq33  
21n02
5n38
Equ
19.1  
41
61.9  
[2..22]
SQ73
21Li36
1s21
9s40   
Vir
18.5
75
17.5
[15..21]
Hylonome
21Cp40
3n38
18s07
Sgr
25.7  
126
4.2  
[19..31]
Talos
22Aq00r  
17s53
31s00
PsA
1.3
1
23.3
[0..2]
Bienor
22Vi19
4s22
0s57
Leo  
13.8
68
20.7  
[13..20]
Cybele
22Vi49
0s04
2n47
Vir    
3.5
0  
0.0
[0..0]
Eros
23Aq17
11n17
3s05
Aqr   
1.5
2
10.8
[1..2]
GQ21
23Ge27r   
12s46
10n32
Ori
72.3
901  
13.4
[38..149]
Ixion
23Le29
18n49
31n20
LMi
44.6
249
19.6
[30..49]
Neptune
24Ge02r
1s21  
21n58
Tau  
29.9   
164
1.8  
XA255
24Pi11 r
12s04
13s22
Cet
44.9  
162
12.7
[9..50]
Juno
24Sc16
8n57
10s10
Lib  
3.4
4  
13.0  
[2..3]
Aura
24Sa26
8s22
31s42
Sco  
3.4
0
0.0
[0..0]  
Bacchus
24Li26
4n11
5s35
Vir
0.9
1
9.4
[1..1]
XR190
24Pi55 r
45n56  
39n24
Lac    
61.7   
430
46.7
[52..62]
GV9
25Ta34 r
5n31
24n31
Tau  
43.7   
270
22.0
[38..45]
CF119
25Ar52 r
19n49
28n19
Psc
80.2
827  
19.7
[38..138]
CY118
25Ta54 r
25s03
5s09    
Eri
80.3  
853  
25.6
[34..146]
Radamantus
25Pi56 r
2s35
3s59
Aqr
38.2  
242
12.8
[33..45]
TD10
26Li02
2n13
7s59
Vir  
93.9   
941  
5.9  
[13..180]
QB1
26Sc03
1s48
21s02
Lib  
45.5
294
2.2
[41..47]
QF6
26Li13
19n50
8n23
Boo  
11.6
0
0.0
[0..0]
Midheav
26Vi21
0n00
1n27
Vir  
Thalia
26Aq28
10s33
22s35
Aqr
3.0
0  
0.0  
[0..0]
Hidalgo
26Sc47
25s41
44s14
Lup
9.1
0
0.0
[0..0]
CO1
26Ge55r
3n06
26n31
Tau
18.7   
94
19.8
[11..30]
Amor
27Pi08 r
6s27
7s03
Cet
2.8
3
12.0
[1..3]  
BL41
27Cp08
4n15
16s35
Sgr  
9.9
31  
13.3
[7..13]
Hephaistos
27Sc08
1s18
20s47
Lib
0.4
3
13.2
[0..4]
Amycus
27Cp27
3s21
23s58
Sgr
23.7   
126  
13.3
[15..35]
MS4
27Le37
16s34
3s17
Sex
39.4
271
17.7
[36..48]
Iris
27Sa53
1n21
22s06
Sgr
2.6
0
0.0
[0..0]
EL61
28Ge01r  
16s45
6n41
Ori
40.6   
281
28.2
[35..51]
Hebe
28Vi31
4n58   
5n09
Vir
2.8
0
0.0
[0..0]
Lilith
28Sa41
1n16
22s11
Sgr
3.0  
0
0.0
[0..0]
TY364
28Sc42
23n57
3n32
Ser  
39.2
245
24.8
[37..42]
Jupiter
28Li46
1n06
10s01
Vir
5.5
12
1.3
Toro
29Sa00
1n49
21s38
Sgr
1.3
2
9.4
[1..2]   
Sun
29Sc03
0n00
19s57
Lib  
1.0
1
0.0
Metis
29Le34
5n03
16n21
Leo
2.2
0
0.0  
[0..0]   
KX14
29Ge42r   
0n06
23n33
Gem  
38.7
241
0.4
[37..40]
Deucalion
29Ge45r
0n13
23n41
Gem
46.6
292
0.4
[41..47]
OM67
29Li45
20s54
30s47
Cen
72.8
995
23.3  
[40..160]
CO104
29Li47
1s46
13s03
Vir
23.0
119
3.1
[21..28]
PB112
29Sc53
13s49
33s36
Lup
86.8
1128
15.4
[36..181]


Focused Minor Planets

TY364   =  28 Sc 42
Sun       =  29 Sc 03
PB112 =  29 Sc 53
Hephaistos = 27 Sc 08
RD215  =   0 Sa 00

Jupiter  = 28 Li 46      Semisextile
------------------------

OO67    = 13 Sc 14

Saturn  = 12 Sa 56     Semisextile

Orcus   = 12 Pi 29 r    Trine
------------------------

TL66    =  10 Cp 23
Node    =    9 Cp 24 r
-----------------------

AW197  =   7 Ta 45 r

Mars     =    6 Le 35      Square
Quaoar =    6 Le 42 r

Moon   =    6 Pi 45       Sextile
-----------------------

Chaos   =   2 Aq 21

Uranus  =  3 Sa 31  Sextile
Chiron    =  2 Sa 50

Pallas     =  4 Li 18    Trine
-----------------------

FZ173    =  14 Ge 21 r
Pluto      = 15 Ge 00 r
Venus    = 15 Sa 10r

Varuna    = 14 Aq 44      Trine
----------------------

FY9          = 16 Ta 54 r

Mercury  = 16 Sa 47   Quincunx
----------------------


GQ21        = 23 Ge 27r
Neptune  = 24 Ge 02r
Aura          = 24 Sa 26

Ixion          = 23 Le 29    Sextile

Eros         = 23 Aq 17    Trine

XR190     = 24 Pi 55 r   Square
_______________________________


Astrological Setting (Sidereal - Fagan/Bradley)


     RIYAL  Mon November 21 1898  UT 7h30m00s  Lat50n43  Lon3e50   SORT ALL     

Planet
Longit.
Latitude
Declin.
Const.
H.D.
Period
Inclin.
O.Range
GQ21
0Ge07 r
12s46
10n32
Ori  
72.3
901  
13.4
[38..149]
Ixion
0Le09
18n49
31n21
LMi  
44.6
249
19.6
[30..49]
Neptune
0Ge42 r
1s21
21n58
Tau
29.9
164
1.8
XA255
0Pi51 r
12s04
13s22
Cet
44.9
162
12.7
[9..50]
Juno
0Sc56
8n57
10s10
Lib
3.4
4
13.0
[2..3]
Aura
1Sa06
8s22
31s42
Sco
3.4
0
0.0
[0..0]
Bacchus
1Li06
4n11
5s35
Vir
0.9
1
9.4
[1..1]
XR190
1Pi35 r
45n56
39n23
Lac
61.7
430  
46.7  
[52..62]
GV9
2Ta14 r
5n31
24n31
Tau
43.7  
270    
22.0
[38..45]
CF119
2Ar32 r
19n49
28n19
Psc  
80.2  
827  
19.7
[38..138]
CY118
2Ta34 r
25s03
5s09  
Eri
80.3  
853
25.6
[34..146]
Radamantus
2Pi36 r
2s35
3s59
Aqr  
38.2
242
12.8
[33..45]
TD10
2Li42
2n13    
7s59
Vir
93.9   
941
5.9  
[13..180]
QB1
2Sc43
1s48
21s02
Lib   
45.5
294
2.2
[41..47]
Midheav
3Vi01
0n00  
1n27
Vir  
Thalia
3Aq09
10s33
22s35
Aqr
3.0
0
0.0
[0..0]
Hidalgo
3Sc27
25s41
44s14  
Lup
9.1  
0
0.0
[0..0]
CO1
3Ge35 r
3n06
26n31
Tau   
18.7
94
19.8  
[11..30]
Amor
3Pi48 r
6s27  
7s03
Cet
2.8
3
12.0
[1..3]  
BL41
3Cp48
4n15
16s35
Sgr
9.9
31
13.3
[7..13]
Hephaistos
3Sc48
1s18
20s47
Lib  
0.4
3
13.2  
[0..4]  
Amycus
4Cp07
3s21
23s58
Sgr
23.7   
126
13.3
[15..35]
MS4
4Le17   
16s34
3s17
Sex
39.4
271  
17.7  
[36..48]
Iris
4Sa33
1n21  
22s06
Sgr
2.6
0
0.0  
[0..0]
EL61
4Ge41 r
16s45
6n41
Ori
40.6
281
28.2
[35..51]
Hebe
5Vi11
4n58
5n09
Vir
2.8
0
0.0  
[0..0]
Lilith
5Sa21
1n16
22s11
Sgr
3.0
0
0.0
[0..0]
TY364
5Sc23
23n57    
3n32
Ser
39.2
245
24.8
[37..42]
Jupiter
5Li27
1n06
10s01
Vir
5.5
12  
1.3  
Toro
5Sa41
1n49
21s37
Sgr
1.3
2
9.4
[1..2]
Sun
5Sc43
0n00
19s57
Lib
1.0
1
0.0
Metis
6Le14
5n03
16n21
Leo  
2.2
0
0.0
[0..0]
KX14
6Ge22 r
0n06
23n33  
Gem  
38.7   
241
0.4
[37..40]
Deucalion
6Ge25 r
0n13
23n40   
Gem
46.6
292
0.4  
[41..47]
OM67
6Li25
20s54
30s47
Cen     
72.8
995
23.3
[40..160]
CO104
6Li27
1s46
13s03
Vir
23.0  
119  
3.1
[21..28]
PB112
6Sc33
13s49
33s36
Lup
86.8
1128
15.4
[36..181]
RD215
6Sc40
13n56
6s31
Oph  
76.8  
1373
25.8  
[38..209]
Okyrhoe
6Aq45
4n49
6s57
Aqr
11.0    
24
15.6  
[6..11]  
MW12
6Le45
12s22
0s09
Sex
50.2
310
21.5
[40..52]
UX25
7Sa42
17n53
5s34  
Ser  
47.8
281
19.4
[37..49]
Ascend
8Sc15
0n00
20s29    
Sco
Huya
8Ta21 r
15s11   
5n37   
Tau
50.2
246
15.5
[28..50]
RL43
8Ta28 r
12s36    
8n10
Tau
24.5
121  
12.3
[23..25]
CR105
8Pi34 r  
19s17
16s53
Cet
68.8  
3143
22.8  
[44..385]
TX300
8Li46
23s45
34s16
Cen
42.6
288  
25.8  
[38..49]
XX143
8Aq48
5s39
15s59
Aqr
9.8
76
6.8  
[10..26]
RN43
8Vi52
1s33
2s18
Vir
42.5
270  
19.2  
[41..42]
Chaos
9Cp01     
11s31   
30s50
Mic   
50.2
310
12.0  
[41..50]
Heracles
9Aq27
6n24
4s30   
Aqr
3.2     
2
9.7
[0..3]
Chiron
9Sc30
3n34  
17s14   
Sco
9.6
50
7.0  
[8..19]
GZ32
9Li39   
13n52
0n33    
Vir
19.2
112  
15.0
[18..28]
Typhon
9Aq53  
0s41
10s58
Aqr    
57.8
232  
2.4  
[17..58]
Uranus
10Sc11
0n08
20s45
Sco
18.9
85
0.8
Pallas
10Vi58
5s51
7s05    
Vir    
2.2
5
34.7  
[2..3]  
Vesta
11Sa23
0s36
23s58
Sgr
2.2  
4
7.1  
[2..3]
PJ30
11Ca35r
1s08
17n57  
Cnc
70.2
1395
5.6
[29..221]
Echeclus
11Vi37
0n34    
1s27
Vir   
13.8
34
4.3
[6..15]  
Eunomia
11Sa54   
0s57
24s17    
Sgr
2.6
0
0.0  
[0..0]
Urania
11Pi57
3n14
5n04
Psc    
2.1
0
0.0
[0..0]
KF77
12Aq12
2s31
11s50
Aqr
21.8  
132
4.4  
[20..32]
DH5
12Le13   
1s39
7n57
Leo
14.4  
104  
22.5
[14..30]
TO66
12Li17   
18s26
30s39  
Cen  
38.3
288  
27.4  
[38..49]
Dioretsa
12Ar26 r
20s03  
5s31
Cet
26.8  
0
0.0  
[0..0]  
Elatus
12Sc28
1n53
19s25
Sco
14.5
45
5.6
[7..18]
DonQuixote          
12Ca35r
25n33
43n21
Lyn
7.1
9
28.7
[1..7]
RR43
13Sc03
9n17
12s14
Oph
45.5
286  
28.5
[38..49]
Icarus
13Sa11
15s29  
38s45
CrA
0.7  
12
3.1  
[0..2]
Mars
13Ca15
2n10
20n44
Cnc   
1.6
2   
1.9      
Quaoar
13Ca22r
7s08
11n42
Cnc
44.5
286
8.0
[42..45]
Moon
13Aq25
4n22
4s59
Aqr  
1.0  
0
5.2
VQ94
13Pi25 r
51s33
43s35  
Phe  
111.6  
2580
71.0  
[7..369]
SB60
13Vi26
23s32   
24s10
Crt
38.5
276  
23.9
[38..47]
HB57
13Ge41r
15s25
7n52
Mon
91.2  
2044
15.5  
[38..284]
Aglaja
13Le59
3n30
12n05
Leo
3.3  
0
0.0  
[0..0]  
Sedna
14Pi00 r
8s30
4s53
Cet    
132.9
10633
12.0  
[76..891]
Chariklo
14Cp23
4n54
13s36
Aqr
17.2
63
23.4  
[13..18]
AW197
14Ar25 r
24n18  
36n51
And  
53.0
322  
24.4  
[41..53]
Nessus
14Aq46r
12s10
19s47
Aqr
29.4  
122
15.7
[12..37]
Phaethon
14Ge58r
15n56
39n05
Aur  
1.4  
1  
21.5
[0..2]  
GB32
15Ge44r  
13s57
9n13
Mon
98.4
3047
14.2
[35..385]
Astraea
15Aq51
3s41
11s33
Aqr
2.9  
0
0.0  
[0..0]
Node
16Sa04r
0n00
23s07
Sgr
BU48
16Sc27
12n19
9s45  
Oph
45.0  
193
14.3  
[21..46]
Apollo
16Ca43r
8n34
25n58    
Cnc
1.7
2
6.4  
[1..2]  
FP185
16Ta46 r
29s52
7s36
Eri
93.0  
3182  
30.9
[34..399]
TL66
17Sa03
21n41
1s25
Aql
76.1
761
23.9
[35..131]
RM43
17Sa11
9s24
32s25
Sgr
79.7
859  
28.7  
[35..145]
UR163
17Li16
0s43  
15s41
Lib
42.1
376
0.7
[37..67]
Psyche
17Sc33
2n17
19s50
Oph
3.1
0
0.0
[0..0]
AZ84
17Aq37r
13n39
5n10
Peg
36.7   
247
13.6  
[32..46]
OX3
18Vi43  
3s05
7s36
Vir
41.3
182
3.2
[18..46]
CZ118
18Ge48r
25n07
47n52
Lyn
96.5
1243
27.7
[37..194]
FZ53
19Sc07
27n45
5n14
Oph
25.5   
117
34.8  
[12..35]
Orcus
19Aq09r
20n16
11n51
Peg
30.5
245
20.6
[30..48]
Sappho
19Li13
0s15   
15s51
Lib
2.6
0
0.0
[0..0]
Pelion
19Sc29
7n04
15s20
Oph
17.6
90
9.4
[17..23]
Thereus
19Pi30 r
3n14
8n03
Psc     
11.1  
38
20.2
[9..14]  
Saturn
19Sc36
1n25
20s57
Oph
10.0
30
2.5
Ceres
19Vi41
8n37
2n47   
Vir
2.6
5
10.6
[3..3]  
RZ215
19Vi42
14s09
18s09
Crv  
81.3
1047
25.4
[31..175]
Crantor
19Ge45r
3s30  
19n19
Gem
19.6
86
12.8  
[14..25]
OO67
19Li54
19n43
3n01
Ser
106.2
14458
20.1  
[21..1166]
OP32
20Le03  
9s41
2s25
Sex
42.8
286
27.1
[39..48]
Logos
20Pi04 r
2s38
2n52   
Psc
44.8  
301
2.9
[40..50]
Asbolus
20Ca20r
14n30
30n34  
Leo
27.2
76
17.6  
[7..29]
Amfortas
20Li30
2n14  
13s52
Lib
2.0
0
0.0  
[0..0]  
RZ214
20Li39
3n55
12s18
Lib   
65.9   
790
20.4
[37..134]
FZ173
21Ta01 r
12n19
34n46  
Aur
82.2  
787
12.7
[32..138]
SA278
21Cp09
9n14
7s39
Aqr
95.2
880  
16.3  
[33..151]
Hekate
21Le18
2n11
8n04
Leo
3.5
0  
0.0
[0..0]
Varuna
21Cp24  
11s13
27s07
PsA  
41.3
281
17.2
[41..45]
Pluto
21Ta40 r
10s04
12n36
Ori
47.1
247  
17.2  
[29..49]
Venus
21Sc50r
3s24
26s00
Oph
0.7
1  
3.4
TC302
21Cp52
32s36
46s56
Gru  
69.1
410  
35.1
[39..71]
Hygiea
21Le52
2s26  
3n36
Leo   
3.1
0
0.0
[0..0]
Vertex
21Ge55
WL7
21Cp59
7s55
23s48
Cap
21.2
90
11.2
[15..25]
PN34  
22Ge13r
3n56    
26n28
Gem
47.2
172
16.6
[13..49]
UJ438
22Sa44
1n31
20s59
Sgr    
26.9
74
3.8
[8..27]  
GM137
22Pi45 r
16s06
8s32
Cet
9.2
23
15.6
[7..9]  
Flora
22Sc51
1n57
20s47
Oph
2.4
0
0.0  
[0..0]
Mercury
23Sc27
2s20  
25s07
Oph   
0.4   
0   
7.0
FY9
23Ar34 r
16s16    
1n15
Cet
38.9
304
29.0
[38..52]
YQ179
23Pi38 r
21s03
12s47  
Cet  
84.5
824
20.9  
[37..139]
VS2
24Sc03
10s04
32s52  
Sco
42.1
249
14.8
[37..42]
Eurydike
24Ca50
4n48  
19n57
Leo
3.2
0
0.0
[0..0]
QB243
25Ta18 r
6n31
29n27
Aur   
53.8
203
6.8  
[15..54]
Pylenor
25Le21
2n36
6n52
Leo
18.4
69
5.4
[12..22]
Orpheus
25Cp50
0n16
14s50
Cap
1.3  
1
2.7  
[1..2]  
VR130
25Ge53r
3s31  
18n35
Gem
17.8   
117  
3.5  
[15..33]
Cyllarus
26Ca36r
12n40
26n49
Leo     
32.8  
134  
12.6
[16..36]
Megaira
26Sc46
2n02
21s04
Oph  
2.7
0
0.0  
[0..0]
Apogee
26Ta51
1n43
24n48
Tau
QD112
27Ca09
9n48
23n56
Leo
21.8
83
14.5
[8..30]
XZ255
27Li16
1n06
16s51
Lib
16.3
64
2.6
[15..17]
Pholus
27Ta25 r
18s08
5n02  
Ori
9.4
91
24.7
[9..32]
Ceto
27Aq52r
0s31
3s58
Aqr
84.2
998
22.4
[18..182]
Eris
27Aq53r
33s20
33s42
Scl
91.8
558  
44.1  
[38..98]
Euphrosyne
27Cp55  
21s34
34s41
PsA
3.3
0
0.0
[0..0]  
Damocles
28Cp13
21n02
5n38
Equ
19.1
41
61.9
[2..22]
SQ73
28Vi16
1s21  
9s40
Vir   
18.5   
75
17.5
[15..21]
Hylonome
28Sa20
3n38
18s07
Sgr    
25.7
126
4.2  
[19..31]
Talos
28Cp40r  
17s53  
31s00
PsA
1.3
1  
23.3
[0..2]
Bienor  
28Le59
4s22
0s57
Leo
13.8
68  
20.7  
[13..20]
Cybele
29Le29
0s04
2n47
Vir  
3.5
0
0.0
[0..0]
Eros  
29Cp57
11n17
3s05
Aqr
1.5   
2
10.8
[1..2]

Focused Minor Planets


TY364    =   5 Sc 23
Sun        =   5 Sc 43
PB112    =   6 Sc 33
Hephaistos = 3 Sc 48
RD215   =   6 Sc 40

Jupiter  =  5 Li 27         Semisextile
------------------------

OO67   = 19 Li 54

Saturn = 19 Sc 36        Semisextile

Orcus   = 19 Aq 09r      Trine
------------------------

TL66    = 17 Sa 03
Node    = 16 Sa 04r
-----------------------

AW197 = 14 Ar 25 r

Mars     = 13 Ca 15       Square
Quaoar = 13 Ca 22 r

Moon   =  13 Aq 25      Sextile
-----------------------

Chaos   =   9 Cp 01

Uranus = 10 Sc 11      Sextile
Chiron    =   9 Sc 30

Pallas     = 10 Vi 58      Trine
-----------------------

FZ173    =  21 Ta 01 r
Pluto      = 21 Ta 40 r
Venus    = 21 Sc 50r

Varuna   =  21 Cp 24       Trine
----------------------

FY9           =  23 Ar 34 r

Mercury  = 23 Sc 27     Quincunx
----------------------

GQ21        =   0 Ge 07 r
Neptune  =   0 Ge 42 r
Aura          =   1 Sa 06

Ixion          =   0 Le 09      Sextile

Eros         =  29 Cp 57    Trine

XR190     =    1 Pi 35 r    Square
_______________________________


Only for TY364, first very tentative keywords:

Mystery                                                             

Attempting the Impossible      

Persistent, hallucinating power

Anachronistic Realism
____________________________________________

Posted to Centaurs (YahooGroups) on January 15, 2007

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